Monster Theory Reading Culture

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MONSTER

THEORY

Reading Culture

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis London

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An earlier version of Chapter 2 was first published in In Geardagum (June 1992), reprinted by permission. Chapter 3 originally appeared in Daniel Fischlin, ed.,

Academic Publishers, reprinted by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monster theory : reading culture / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, editor. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8166-2854-8 (hardcover). — ISBN 0-8166-2855-6 (pbk.) 1. Monsters in literature. 2. Abnormalities, Human, in literature. 3. Grotesque in literature. 4. Difference (Psychology) in literature. I. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome.

PN56.M55M55 1996

809'.93353—dc20 96-21914 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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Preface: In a Time of Monsters vii I. Monster Theory

1. Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen 3 2. Beowulf as Palimpsest

Ruth Waterhouse 26 3. Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and

the Resistance to Postmodernism

David L. Clark 40 II. Monstrous Identity

4. The Odd Couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb

Anne Lake Prescott 75 5. America's "United Siamese Brothers": Chang and Eng and

Nineteenth-Century Ideologies of Democracy and Domesticity Allison Pingree 92 6. Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the Family in

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

David A. Hedrich Hirsch 115

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III. Monstrous Inquiry

7. "No Monsters at the Resurrection": Inside Some Conjoined Twins

Stephen Pender 143

8. Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in Montaigne's "Des Boyteux"

Lawrence D. Kritzman 168 9. Hermaphrodites Newly Discovered: The Cultural Monsters of

Sixteenth-Century France

Kathleen Perry Long 183 10. Anthropometamorphosis: John Bulwer's Monsters of Cosmetology

and the Science of Culture

Mary Baine Campbell 202

IV. Monstrous History

11. Vampire Culture

Frank Grady 225

12. The Alien and Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders

William Sayers 242 13. Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to

Saracen Alterity

Michael Uebel 264

14. Dinosaurs-R-Us: The (Un)Natural History of Jurassic Park

John O'Neill 292

Contributors 309 Index 312

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We live in a time of monsters.

Channel-surf for a moment. Britain's Channel Four reports a new menace of the technological to be practiced against the organic: Russia has developed a terrorist's dream weapon, a nuclear bomb the size of a baseball that utilizes a mysterious compound called red mercury to "destroy human life but leave buildings and machinery intact." This ex-plosive device contributes to the widespread fear that the synthetic and mechanistic is destined to eradicate its own creators—an anxiety that could be labeled Frankenstein's monster syndrome. Dr. Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, declares, "I find the entire business terrifying."1

The highest-grossing film of 1993—indeed, of all time—is Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. The plot of this movie-cum-marketing jugger-naut involves the technology-assisted return from the dead of primor-dial monsters who menace the integrity of the American family by threatening to devour its children. That Jurassic Park would have been a far superior piece of cinema if its computer-animated velociraptors had in fact ingested the kids they merely threaten suggests that these mon-sters arrive at a time when traditional nuclear families perhaps need to be troubled.

"On November 2,1993, Cincinnati voters amended the city's charter to bar the city council from enacting or enforcing laws that give equal legal protection to lesbian, gay, or bisexual citizens in seeking employment, housing, and public accommodations."2 Colorado struggles with its own

similar ban, while Hawaii debates the legality of same-sex marriages and

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viii Prsssseface

the U.S. military wonders if straight soldiers are safe sharing the same dormitories and showers as gays.

When serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was tried for his crimes, the press repeatedly linked his monstrousness (defined both psychologically and legally) to his sexuality; "normal" serial killers prey upon women and children (e.g., Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy). Jeffrey's father Lionel re-cently published A Father's Story, a biography that examines the early life of his cannibalistic son.3 The book puzzles over how a boy who as a child

seemed sweet and docile could turn out so terribly wrong.

The famous "surgeon's photo" of the Loch Ness monster has been revealed, through a deathbed confession, to have been a fake—a con-struction of twigs bound to a toy submarine. No explanation yet why three thousand other people have testified to seeing Nessie since the 1934 photograph was taken. Meanwhile, the yeti, sasquatch, and Champ (the monster of Lake Champlain) remain at large.

Support groups for men and women who have been abducted and maltreated by aliens are meeting in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. A Harvard psychiatrist who runs such gatherings recently published a book validating their experiences.4

Some new and recent films: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Wolf, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Interview with the Vampire, Mary Reilly, Species, and Nightmare on Elm Street VI.

This collection of cultural sound bites, taken almost at random from the media barrage constitutive of postmodern living, embodies (in mon-strous form) a commentary upon fin de siecle America, a society that has created and commodified "ambient fear"—a kind of total fear that satu-rates day-to-day living, prodding and silently antagonizing but never speaking its own name.5 This anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as

a cultural fascination with monsters—a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens. And so the monster appears simultaneously as the demonic disemboweler of slasher films and as a wide-eyed, sickeningly cute plush toy for children: velociraptor and Barney.6

The contributors to this volume acknowledge that we live in a time of monsters. Together, we explore what happens when monstrousness is taken seriously, as a mode of cultural discourse. This examination

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neces-sarily involves how the manifold boundaries (temporal, geographic, bodily, technological) that constitute "culture" become imbricated in the construction of the monster—a category that is itself a kind of limit case, an extreme version of marginalization, an abjecting epistemologi-cal device basic to the mechanics of deviance construction and identity formation. Although the methods vary and the modes of interrogation span a wide range of critical praxes, what unites all of the contributors (regardless of the specific temporal or spatial boundaries of their dis-course) is an insistence that the monster is a problem for cultural studies, a code or a pattern or a presence or an absence that unsettles what has been constructed to be received as natural, as human. As a group we have been especially interested in those time periods that are currently under-represented in cultural studies (especially the Middle Ages and early modern period), but we realize that if we turn to the past—even the re-cent past—as a place to do our monstrous work, it is only because the monsters of the present have beckoned us to those paths.

The contents of this book are arranged under loose, suggestive rubrics that are meant to instigate a chain of resonances rather than delimit sin-gular meanings. The most obvious organization for a book of this kind would perhaps be a chronological ordering of its contents, but such a valorization of time as the primary determinant of meaning goes against what much of this collection asserts. The monster is a category that is not bound by classificatory structurations, least of all one as messy and inadequate as time. To order the contents of this volume diachronically would implicitly argue for a progress narrative that, as I state in "Mon-ster Culture (Seven Theses)," does not—cannot—exist. One of my objec-tives as editor of this collection is to counter the presentism that charac-terizes contemporary cultural studies, its mistaken apotheosis of the postmodern Now over a Past it dismisses as irrelevant. Premodern and early modern periods are typically ignored in essay collections like this one, but in a book on monsters such an omission would doom the pro-ject to failure. The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness: like the ghost of Hamlet, it introjects the disturbing, repressed, but formative traumas of "pre-" into the sensory moment of "post-," binding the one irrevocably to the other. The monster commands, "Remember me": restore my frag-mented body, piece me back together, allow the past its eternal return. The monster haunts; it does not simply bring past and present together,

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x Preface

but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned foreclosure. Joan Copjec makes a similar argument within a psychoanalytic para-digm, in terms of "what Freud would call the latency of historical time with regard to its own comprehension":

This notion of latency must not be positivized, as though something lay dormant but already formed in the past, and simply waited to emerge at some future time; this would indeed be a continuist notion. Instead, latency designates our inaccessibility to ourselves, and hence our depen-dence on others—on other times as well as other subjects.7

We can go further and predict that the repression of these "other times" and "other subjects" will be fatal to cultural studies if its uncritical use of the temporal as a disciplinary marker is not challenged.

Given that monstrosity challenges a coherent or totalizing concept of history, what else could contain the monstrous contents of this book be-side suggestive and provisional groupings? The three essays grouped under the rubric "Monster Theory" foreground the critical underpinnings of their inquiry. My own "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" is a kind of toolbox: a series of reconfigurable postulates about the relationship be-tween monstrous and cultural bodies. Freely blending the medieval with the postmodern (Beowulf with Alien, Richard III with Lestat), I argue that the monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a resistant Other known only through process and movement, never through dissection-table analysis. In "Beowulf as Palimpsest," Ruth Waterhouse draws out one of the central concerns of the collection, antidiachronicity: following the insights of the decon-structionists and the theorists of intertextuality, she argues that we can and should read backward from the present, in a "progression" that makes a problem of temporality rather than simply reinscribes it. And so Grendel is filtered through such intervening texts as Dracula and Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In "Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation," David L.

Clark problematizes the relationship between monster and text even fur-ther, by arguing for the monstrous nature of language itself; through a close reading of a poem by bp Nichols, he argues that language—the thing that speaks us, as speaking subjects—is inherently inhuman. Lan-guage, monstrosity, demonstration—these are the links that bind mon-ster theory, and the collection.

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categories "human" and "monster" are coincipient, mutually constitu-tive, monstrously hybrid. Anne Lake Prescott ("The Odd Couple") scru-tinizes the conjoining of giants and dwarves in Renaissance England. This strange admixture creates an "anamorphic monster" that in turn validates the "paradoxical virtues of defect." Allison Pingree's "America's 'United Siamese Brothers'" examines the ambiguous place between the "normal" and the monstrous that conjoined twins create and relates the nineteenth-century fascination with Chang and Eng's domestic life to postwar anxieties over national identity: the inseparability of Chang and Eng condenses anxieties about the unification of the North and South after the Civil War. David A. Hedrich Hirsch's "Liberty, Equality, Mon-strosity" delivers a political reading of the body of that most famous of all monsters, Victor Frankenstein's despairing creature. In Hirsch's read-ing, familial structuration becomes entangled in the ideological appara-tus of a state that extends sympathy only toward "certain people denned as one's kin, one's patrie? Family values exclude the monster, the Other who does not fit the construction of Selfsame.

Part III, "Monstrous Inquiry," conjoins epistemology, the discourses of science, and the process of cultural self-identification. Stephen Fender's '"No Monsters at the Resurrection'" scrutinizes some early modern dou-bled bodies that call into question boundary demarcations of all kinds. Through a careful analysis of public reaction to monstrous births, Pender undermines the prevailing critical notion that scientific discourse had "rescued" the monster from its embeddedness in a rhetoric of miracle and marvel by the late sixteenth century. Lawrence D. Kritzman's "Rep-resenting the Monster" relocates Montaigne's notions of deformity away from the physical and toward the cognitive. Through a provocative ac-count of Montaigne's version of the Martin Guerre story, Kritzman argues that the monster offers a challenge not only to the "will to totality," but to the very nature of gender and subjectivity. "Hermaphrodites Newly Dis-covered," Kathleen Perry Long's contribution to the collection, examines how a satiric account of the court of Henri III, written across the doubly sexed body of the hermaphrodite, conducts a complex inquiry into the artificiality of both gender roles and language. Mary Baine Campbell

("Anthropometamorphosis") links John Bulwer's seventeenth-century

treatise on "cosmetology" to the rise of the science of anthropology; at the birth of the discipline she finds, haunting inquiry, the monster.

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to-xii Preface

gather in an exploration of how the monster has haunted and continues to haunt, informing (deforming) the very process of historiography. In "Vampire Culture," Frank Grady provides a detailed analysis of Anne Rice's wide-ranging Vampire Chronicles that converts an economic nar-rative into a monstrous one. The essay explores the place of the monster in late capitalism, its relation to a system that tries to make sense of art and value as both commodified history and aesthetic surplus. William Sayers explores the phenomenon of the revenant in Old Norse culture in his essay "The Alien and Alienated as Unquiet Dead." In the family sagas that form his field of interrogation, Sayers finds an attempt at "ethno-genesis," at creating a usable past that makes sense of a difficult present. Michael Uebel ("Unthinking the Monster") unpacks how this process of identity formation was conducted in another field of medieval histo-riography, in the writing of horrifying anti-Muslim polemic that pur-ported to give an accurate account of the interaction between Christen-dom and Islam. By monsterizing Saracen alterity, Christians constructed their image of Self; Uebel turns to this field of "unthought" (what is abjected in the process of becoming Christian, what is constructed as monstrous) to build a theoretical framework for the reading of monsters more generally. Finally, John O'Neill's "Dinosaurs-R-Us" brings us all the way back to the moment of creation, to our own modern myth of Genesis in the dream of genetic engineering. O'Neill links this regressive fascination with the infantilization of science and the darker side of con-sumer culture. Monsters, he reaffirms, still serve as the ultimate incor-poration of our anxieties—about history, about identity, about our very humanity. As they always will.

Notes

1. Quoted in San Jose Mercury News, April 13,1994, iF (from Reuters). It is likely that "red mercury" is a hoax (Boston Globe, August 25,1994, 2), a monstrous imagi-nary substance that embodies and excites all kinds of anxieties about the changing world order; but even the insubstantial can be deadly, as the chain of murders in South Africa attributed to the quest for "red mercury" demonstrates (Philadelphia

Inquirer, August 21,1994, ACte). I am grateful to Mark Cohen for helping me pinpoint

these references.

2. Perspectives (American Historical Society Newsletter) 32 (February 1994): i. 3. Lionel Dahmer, A Father's Story (New York: William Morrow, 1994). This book is listed in the HOLLIS (Harvard Library) electronic catalog under the follow-ing suggestively linked topics that perhaps say everythfollow-ing about familial life in

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late-twentieth-century America: "Fathers—United States—Biography," "Serial murders— Wisconsin—Milwaukee—Case studies," and "Murderers—Wisconsin—Milwaukee— Family relationships."

4. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Scribner's, 1994).

5. See Brian Massumi, "Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear," in The

Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1993), 3-37.

6. Portions of this preface and of chapter i, "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)," have twice been delivered as part of conference presentations. Invariably the audi-ence giggles at the juxtaposition—so seemingly absurd—of the friendly mascot of PBS (Barney) and the equally but oppositely fictionalized dinosaur who thinks like a human and shreds flesh like the Alien (velociraptor). "That's not funny," I chide them, knowing full well that it is; what anxiety, then, do we hide by the laughter? What does the dismissal by declaration of absurd mismatch allow us not to have to think about?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the audiences at the Twenty-seventh Annual Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies Confer-ence (Binghamton, N.Y., October 1993) and the "Reading Monsters, Reading Cul-ture" Conference at the University of Cincinnati (April 1994, where much of this introduction was the keynote address) for their helpfulness in thinking through this monstrous text.

7. Joan Copjec, "Introduction," in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (Lon-don: Verso, 1994), ix.

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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

What I will propose here by way of a first foray, as entrance into this book of monstrous content, is a sketch of a new modus legendi: a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender. In doing so, I will partially violate two of the sacred dicta of recent cultural studies: the compulsion to historical specificity and the insistence that all knowledge (and hence all cartographies of that knowledge) is local. Of the first I will say only that in cultural studies today history (disguised perhaps as "culture") tends to be fetishized as a telos, as a final determinant of meaning; post de Man, post Foucault, post Hayden White, one must bear in mind that history is just another text in a procession of texts, and not a guarantor of any singular signification. A movement away from the longue duree and toward microeconomics (of capital or of gender) is as-sociated most often with Foucauldian criticism; yet recent critics have found that where Foucault went wrong was mainly in his details, in his minute specifics. Nonetheless, his methodology—his archaeology of ideas, his histories of unthought—remains with good reason the chosen route of inquiry for most cultural critics today, whether they work in postmodern cyberculture or in the Middle Ages.

And so I would like to make some grand gestures. We live in an age that has rightly given up on Unified Theory, an age when we realize that history (like "individuality," "subjectivity," "gender," and "culture") is composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth episte-mological wholes. Some fragments will be collected here and bound temporarily together to form a loosely integrated net—or, better, an unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body. Rather than argue a "theory of

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4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

teratology," I offer by way of introduction to the essays that follow a set of breakable postulates in search of specific cultural moments. I offer seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear.

Thesis I: The Monster's Body Is a Cultural Body

Vampires, burial, death: inter the corpse where the road forks, so that when it springs from the grave, it will not know which path to follow. Drive a stake through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at the fork, it will haunt that place that leads to many other places, that point of in-decision. Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body.

The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodi-ment of a certain cultural moembodi-ment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.1

The monster's body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny in-dependence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymo-logically "that which reveals," "that which warns," a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap be-tween the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again. These epistemological spaces between the monster's bones are Derrida's familiar chasm of differance: a genetic un-certainty principle, the essence of the monster's vitality, the reason it al-ways rises from the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed and vanishes into the night.

Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes

We see the damage that the monster wreaks, the material remains (the footprints of the yeti across Tibetan snow, the bones of the giant stranded on a rocky cliff), but the monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else (for who is the yeti if not the medieval wild man? Who is the wild man if not the biblical and classical giant?). No matter how many times King Arthur killed the ogre of Mount Saint Michael, the monster reappeared in another heroic chronicle, bequeath-ing the Middle Ages an abundance of morte d'Arthurs. Regardless of how many times Sigourney Weaver's beleaguered Ripley utterly destroys the

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ambiguous Alien that stalks her, its monstrous progeny return, ready to stalk again in another bigger-than-ever sequel. No monster tastes of death but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns. And so the monster's body is both corporal and in-corporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift.

Each time the grave opens and the unquiet slumberer strides forth ("come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all"), the message pro-claimed is transformed by the air that gives its speaker new life. Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cul-tural, and literary-historical) that generate them. In speaking of the new kind of vampire invented by Bram Stoker, we might explore the foreign count's transgressive but compelling sexuality, as subtly alluring to Jonathan Harker as Henry Irving, Stoker's mentor, was to Stoker.2 Or we

might analyze Murnau's self-loathing appropriation of the same demon in Nosferatu, where in the face of nascent fascism the undercurrent of desire surfaces in plague and bodily corruption. Anne Rice has given the myth a modern rewriting in which homosexuality and vampirism have been conjoined, apotheosized; that she has created a pop culture phe-nomenon in the process is not insignificant, especially at a time when gender as a construct has been scrutinized at almost every social register. In Francis Coppola's recent blockbuster, Bram Stoker's Dracula, the homo-sexual subtext present at least since the appearance of Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian lamia (Carmilla, 1872) has, like the red corpuscles that serve as the film's leitmotif, risen to the surface, primarily as an AIDS awareness that transforms the disease of vampirism into a sadistic (and very me-dieval) form of redemption through the torments of the body in pain. No coincidence, then, that Coppola was putting together a documentary on AIDS at the same time he was working on Dracula.

In each of these vampire stories, the undead returns in slightly differ-ent clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social move-ments or a specific, determining event: la decadence and its new possi-bilities, homophobia and its hateful imperatives, the acceptance of new subjectivities unfixed by binary gender, a fin de siecle social activism paternalistic in its embrace. Discourse extracting a transcultural, trans-temporal phenomenon labeled "the vampire" is of rather limited utility; even if vampiric figures are found almost worldwide, from ancient Egypt to modern Hollywood, each reappearance and its analysis is still bound

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in a double act of construction and reconstitution.3 "Monster theory"

must therefore concern itself with strings of cultural moments, con-nected by a logic that always threatens to shift; invigorated by change and escape, by the impossibility of achieving what Susan Stewart calls the desired "fall or death, the stopping" of its gigantic subject,4

mon-strous interpretation is as much process as epiphany, a work that must content itself with fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth, shad-ows, obscured glimpses—signifiers of monstrous passing that stand in for the monstrous body itself).

Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis

The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categorization. Of the nightmarish creature that Ridley Scott brought to life in Alien, Harvey Greenberg writes:

It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution; by turns bivalve, crustacean, reptilian, and humanoid. It seems capable of lying dormant within its egg indefinitely. It sheds its skin like a snake, its carapace like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp It responds according to Lamarckian and Darwinian principles.5

This refusal to participate in the classincatory "order of things" is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally inco-herent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic struc-turation. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.

Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes—as "that which questions binary thinking and introduces a crisis."6 This power to evade and to undermine has coursed through the

monster's blood from classical times, when despite all the attempts of Aristotle (and later Pliny, Augustine, and Isidore) to incorporate the monstrous races7 into a coherent epistemological system, the monster

always escaped to return to its habitations at the margins of the world (a purely conceptual locus rather than a geographic one).8 Classical

"won-der books" radically un"won-dermine the Aristotelian taxonomic system, for by refusing an easy compartmentalization of their monstrous contents, they demand a radical rethinking of boundary and normality. The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in

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the freakish compilation of the monster's body. A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a "system" allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration—allowing what Hogle has called with a wonderful pun "a deeper play of differences, a nonbinary polymorphism at the 'base' of human nature."9

The horizon where the monsters dwell might well be imagined as the visible edge of the hermeneutic circle itself: the monstrous offers an es-cape from its hermetic path, an invitation to explore new spirals, new and interconnected methods of perceiving the world.10 In the face of

the monster, scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble. The monstrous is a genus too large to be encapsulated in any conceptual sys-tem; the monster's very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure; like the giants of Mandeville's Travels, it threatens to devour "all raw & quyk" any thinker who insists otherwise. The monster is in this way the living embodiment of the phenomenon Derrida has famously labeled the "supplement" (ce dangereux supplement):11 it breaks apart bifurcating,

"either/or" syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to "and/or," introducing what Barbara Johnson has called "a revolution in the very logic of meaning."12

Full of rebuke to traditional methods of organizing knowledge and human experience, the geography of the monster is an imperiling ex-panse, and therefore always a contested cultural space.

Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference

The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within. Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.

The exaggeration of cultural difference into monstrous aberration is familiar enough. The most famous distortion occurs in the Bible, where the aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan are envisioned as menacing giants to justify the Hebrew colonization of the Promised Land (Numbers 13). Representing an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement

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or extermination by rendering the act heroic. In medieval France the chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing "Saracens" as "mon-stra," propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of the East by the West. This representational project was part of a whole dictionary of strategic glosses in which "monstra" slipped into significa-tions of the feminine and the hypermasculine.

A recent newspaper article on Yugoslavia reminds us how persistent these divisive mythologies can be, and how they can endure divorced from any grounding in historical reality:

A Bosnian Serb militiaman, hitchhiking to Sarajevo, tells a reporter in all earnestness that the Muslims are feeding Serbian children to the animals in the zoo. The story is nonsense. There aren't any animals left alive in the Sarajevo zoo. But the militiaman is convinced and can recall all the wrongs that Muslims may or may not have perpetrated during their 500 years of rule.13

In the United States, Native Americans were presented as unredeemable savages so that the powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny could push westward with disregard. Scattered throughout Europe by the Diaspora and steadfastly refusing assimilation into Christian society, Jews have been perennial favorites for xenophobic misrepresentation, for here was an alien culture living, working, and even at times prospering within vast communities dedicated to becoming homogeneous and monolithic. The Middle Ages accused the Jews of crimes ranging from the bringing of the plague to bleeding Christian children to make their Passover meal. Nazi Germany simply brought these ancient traditions of hate to their conclusion, inventing a Final Solution that differed from earlier persecutions only in its technological efficiency.

Political or ideological difference is as much a catalyst to monstrous representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm. A political figure suddenly out of favor is transformed like an unwilling participant in a science experiment by the appointed historians of the replacement regime: "monstrous history" is rife with sudden, Ovidian metamorphoses, from Vlad Tepes to Ronald Reagan. The most illus-trious of these propaganda-bred demons is the English king Richard III, whom Thomas More famously described as "little of stature, ill fetured

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of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard fauoured of visage. . . . hee came into the worlde with feete for-ward, . . . also not vntothed."14 From birth, More declares, Richard

was a monster, "his deformed body a readable text"15 on which was

in-scribed his deviant morality (indistinguishable from an incorrect politi-cal orientation).

The almost obsessive descanting on Richard from Polydor Vergil in the Renaissance to the Friends of Richard III Incorporated in our own era demonstrates the process of "monster theory" at its most active: cul-ture gives birth to a monster before our eyes, painting over the normally proportioned Richard who once lived, raising his shoulder to deform simultaneously person, cultural response, and the possibility of objectiv-ity.16 History itself becomes a monster: defeaturing, self-deconstructive,

always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind its disparate elements into a single, unnatural body. At the same time Richard moves between Monster and Man, the disturbing suggestion arises that this incoherent body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well be our own.

The difficult project of constructing and maintaining gender identi-ties elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus to teratogenesis. The woman who oversteps the bound-aries of her gender role risks becoming a Scylla, Weird Sister, Lilith ("die erste Eva," "la mere obscure"),17 Bertha Mason, or Gorgon.18 "Deviant"

sexual identity is similarly susceptible to monsterization. The great me-dieval encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais describes the visit of a her-maphroditic cynocephalus to the French court in his Speculum naturale (31.126).19 Its male reproductive organ is said to be disproportionately

large, but the monster could use either sex at its own discretion. Bruno Roy writes of this fantastic hybrid: "What warning did he come to deliver to the king? He came to bear witness to sexual norms.... He embodied the punishment earned by those who violate sexual taboos."20 This strange

creature, a composite of the supposedly discrete categories "male" and "female," arrives before King Louis to validate heterosexuality over homo-sexuality, with its supposed inversions and transformations ("Equa fit equus," one Latin writer declared; "The horse becomes a mare").21 The

strange dog-headed monster is a living excoriation of gender ambiguity and sexual abnormality, as Vincent's cultural moment defines them: heteronormalization incarnate.

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From the classical period into the twentieth century, race has been almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of monsters as culture, gen-der, and sexuality. Africa early became the West's significant other, the sign of its ontological difference simply being skin color. According to the Greek myth of Phaeton, the denizens of mysterious and uncertain Ethiopia were black because they had been scorched by the too-close passing of the sun. The Roman naturalist Pliny assumed nonwhite skin to be symptomatic of a complete difference in temperament and attrib-uted Africa's darkness to climate; the intense heat, he said, had burned the Africans' skin and malformed their bodies (Natural History, 2.80). These differences were quickly moralized through a pervasive rhetoric of deviance. Paulinus of Nola, a wealthy landowner turned early church homilist, explained that the Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice rather than by the sun, and the anonymous commentator to Theodulus's influential Ecloga (tenth century) succinctly glossed the meaning of the word Ethyopium: "Ethiopians, that is, sinners. Indeed, sinners can rightly be compared to Ethiopians, who are black men presenting a terrifying appearance to those beholding them."22 Dark skin was associated with

the fires of hell, and so signified in Christian mythology demonic prove-nance. The perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite of monsters gener-ally was quickly affixed to the Ethiopian; this linking was only strength-ened by a xenophobic backlash as dark-skinned people were forcibly imported into Europe early in the Renaissance. Narratives of miscegena-tion arose and circulated to sancmiscegena-tion official policies of exclusion; Queen Elizabeth is famous for her anxiety over "blackamoores" and their sup-posed threat to the "increase of people of our own nation."23

Through all of these monsters the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur. To complicate this category confusion further, one kind of alterity is often written as another, so that national difference (for example) is transformed into sexual difference. Giraldus Cambrensis demonstrates just this slippage of the foreign in his Topography of Ireland; when he writes of the Irish (ostensibly simply to provide information about them to a curious English court, but actually as a first step toward invading and colonizing the island), he observes:

It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of faith.... These people who have customs so different from others, and so opposite to them, on mak-ing signs either with the hands or the head, beckon when they mean that

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you should go away, and nod backwards as often as they wish to be rid of you. Likewise, in this nation, the men pass their water sitting, the women like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp It legs stuck out on each side of the horse.24

One kind of inversion becomes another as Giraldus deciphers the alpha-bet of Irish culture—and reads it backwards, against the norm of English masculinity. Giraldus creates a vision of monstrous gender (aberrant, demonstrative): the violation of the cultural codes that valence gendered behaviors creates a rupture that must be cemented with (in this case) the binding, corrective mortar of English normalcy. A bloody war of sub-jugation followed immediately after the promulgation of this text, re-mained potent throughout the High Middle Ages, and in a way contin-ues to this day.

Through a similar discursive process the East becomes feminized (Said) and the soul of Africa grows dark (Gates).25 One kind of

differ-ence becomes another as the normative categories of gender, sexuality, national identity, and ethnicity slide together like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram, abjecting from the center that which becomes the monster. This violent foreclosure erects a self-validating, Hegelian master/slave dialectic that naturalizes the subjugation of one cultural body by another by writing the body excluded from personhood and agency as in every way different, monstrous. A polysemy is granted so that a greater threat can be encoded; multiplicity of meanings, paradoxi-cally, iterates the same restricting, agitprop representations that nar-rowed signification performs. Yet a danger resides in this multiplication: as difference, like a Hydra, sprouts two heads where one has been lopped away, the possibilities of escape, resistance, disruption arise with more force.

Rene Girard has written at great length about the real violence these debasing representations enact, connecting monsterizing depiction with the phenomenon of the scapegoat. Monsters are never created ex nihilo, but through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which elements are extracted "from various forms" (including—indeed, espe-cially—marginalized social groups) and then assembled as the monster, "which can then claim an independent identity."26 The political-cultural

monster, the embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators, to demonstrate

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the potential for the system to differ from its own difference, in other words not to be different at all, to cease to exist as a system— Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality.... Despite what is said around us persecutors are never obsessed with difference but rather by its unutterable contrary, the lack of difference.27

By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed. Because it is a body across which difference has been repeatedly written, the monster (like Frankenstein's creature, that combination of odd somatic pieces stitched together from a community of cadavers) seeks out its author to demand its raison d'etre—and to bear witness to the fact that it could have been constructed Otherwise. Godzilla trampled Tokyo; Girard frees him here to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.

Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible

The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but it is something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular. From its position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes. The giants of Patagonia, the dragons of the Orient, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park together declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one is better off safely contained within one's own domestic sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state. The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself.

Lycaon, the first werewolf in Western literature, undergoes his lupine metamorphosis as the culmination of a fable of hospitality.28 Ovid

re-lates how the primeval giants attempted to plunge the world into anar-chy by wrenching Olympus from the gods, only to be shattered by divine thunderbolts. From their scattered blood arose a race of men who con-tinued their fathers' malignant ways.29 Among this wicked progeny was

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Lycaon tried to kill the ruler of the gods as he slept, and the next day served him pieces of a servant's body as a meal. The enraged Jupiter punished this violation of the host-guest relationship by transforming Lycaon into a monstrous semblance of that lawless, godless state to which his actions would drag humanity back:

The king himself flies in terror and, gaining the fields, howls aloud, at-tempting in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter. His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf, and yet retains some traces of his former shape.30

The horribly fascinating loss of Lycaon's humanity merely reifies his pre-vious moral state; the king's body is rendered all transparence, instantly and insistently readable. The power of the narrative prohibition peaks in the lingering description of the monstrously composite Lycaon, at that median where he is both man and beast, dual natures in a helpless tu-mult of assertion. The fable concludes when Lycaon can no longer speak, only signify.

Whereas monsters born of political expedience and self-justifying na-tionalism function as living invitations to action, usually military (in-vasions, usurpations, colonizations), the monster of prohibition polices the borders of the possible, interdicting through its grotesque body some behaviors and actions, envaluing others. It is possible, for example, that medieval merchants intentionally disseminated maps depicting sea ser-pents like Leviathan at the edges of their trade routes in order to dis-courage further exploration and to establish monopolies.31 Every

mon-ster is in this way a double narrative, two living stories: one that describes how the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves. The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot—must not— be crossed.

Primarily these borders are in place to control the traffic in women, or more generally to establish strictly homosocial bonds, the ties between men that keep a patriarchal society functional. A kind of herdsman, this monster delimits the social space through which cultural bodies may move, and in classical times (for example) validated a tight, hierarchical system of naturalized leadership and control where every man had a

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functional place.32 The prototype in Western culture for this kind of

"geographic" monster is Homer's Polyphemos. The quintessential xeno-phobic rendition of the foreign (the barbaric—that which is unintelligi-ble within a given cultural-linguistic system),33 the Cyclopes are

repre-sented as savages who have not "a law to bless them" and who lack the techne to produce (Greek-style) civilization. Their archaism is conveyed through their lack of hierarchy and of a politics of precedent. This disso-ciation from community leads to a rugged individualism that in Home-ric terms can only be horrifying. Because they live without a system of tradition and custom, the Cyclopes are a danger to the arriving Greeks, men whose identities are contingent upon a compartmentalized func-tion within a deindividualizing system of subordinafunc-tion and control. Polyphemos's victims are devoured, engulfed, made to vanish from the public gaze: cannibalism as incorporation into the wrong cultural body. The monster is a powerful ally of what Foucault calls "the society of the panopticon," in which "polymorphous conducts [are] actually ex-tracted from people's bodies and from their pleasures ... [to be] drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by multifarious power devices."34 Susan Stewart has observed that "the monster's sexuality takes

on a separate life";35 Foucault helps us to see why. The monster embodies

those sexual practices that must not be committed, or that may be com-mitted only through the body of the monster. She and Them!: the mon-ster enforces the cultural codes that regulate sexual desire.

Anyone familiar with the low-budget science fiction movie craze of the 19505 will recognize in the preceding sentence two superb films of the genre, one about a radioactive virago from outer space who kills every man she touches, the other a social parable in which giant ants (really, Communists) burrow beneath Los Angeles (that is, Hollywood) and threaten world peace (that is, American conservatism). I connect these two seemingly unrelated titles here to call attention to the anxieties that monsterized their subjects in the first place, and to enact syntactically an even deeper fear: that the two will join in some unholy miscegenation. We have seen that the monster arises at the gap where difference is per-ceived as dividing a recording voice from its captured subject; the crite-rion of this division is arbitrary, and can range from anatomy or skin color to religious belief, custom, and political ideology. The monster's destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, rather than in fact (and that "fact" is

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subject to constant reconstruction and change). Given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly European and male, women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves repeatedly trans-formed into monsters, whether to validate specific alignments of mas-culinity and whiteness, or simply to be pushed from its realm of thought.36

Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in patriarchal society, but when they threaten to mingle, the entire econ-omy of desire comes under attack.

As a vehicle of prohibition, the monster most often arises to enforce the laws of exogamy, both the incest taboo (which establishes a traffic in women by mandating that they marry outside their families) and the de-crees against interracial sexual mingling (which limit the parameters of that traffic by policing the boundaries of culture, usually in the service of some notion of group "purity").37 Incest narratives are common to every

tradition and have been extensively documented, mainly owing to Levi-Strauss's elevation of the taboo to the founding base of patriarchal soci-ety. Miscegenation, that intersection of misogyny (gender anxiety) and racism (no matter how naive), has received considerably less critical at-tention. I will say a few words about it here.

The Bible has long been the primary source for divine decrees against interracial mixing. One of these pronouncements is a straightforward command from God that comes through the mouth of the prophet Joshua (Joshua 23:iaff.); another is a cryptic episode in Genesis much elaborated during the medieval period, alluding to "sons of God" who impregnate the "daughters of men" with a race of wicked giants (Genesis 6:4). The monsters are here, as elsewhere, expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict notion of group sameness. The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of iden-tity that produce stories like the Genesis episode are strong, and they reappear incessantly. Shakespeare's Caliban, for example, is the product of such an illicit mingling, the "freckled whelp" of the Algerian witch Sycorax and the devil. Charlotte Bronte reversed the usual paradigm in Jane Eyre (white Rochester and lunatic Jamaican Bertha Mason), but horror movies as seemingly innocent as King Kong demonstrate misce-genation anxiety in its brutal essence. Even a film as recent as 1979's immensely successful Alien may have a cognizance of the fear in its under -workings: the grotesque creature that stalks the heroine (dressed in the final scene only in her underwear) drips a glistening slime of K-Y Jelly

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from its teeth; the jaw tendons are constructed of shredded condoms; and the man inside the rubber suit is Bolaji Badejo, a Masai tribesman standing seven feet tall who happened to be studying in England at the time the film was cast.38

The narratives of the West perform the strangest dance around that fire in which miscegenation and its practitioners have been condemned to burn. Among the flames we see the old women of Salem hanging, accused of sexual relations with the black devil; we suspect they died because they crossed a different border, one that prohibits women from managing property and living solitary, unmanaged lives. The flames devour the Jews of thirteenth-century England, who stole children from proper families and baked seder matzo with their blood; as a menace to the survival of English race and culture, they were expelled from the country and their property confiscated. A competing narrative again im-plicates monstrous economics—the Jews were the money lenders, the state and its commerce were heavily indebted to them—but this second story is submerged in a horrifying fable of cultural purity and threat to Christian continuance. As the American frontier expanded beneath the banner of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century, tales circulated about how "Indians" routinely kidnapped white women to furnish wives for themselves; the West was a place of danger waiting to be tamed into farms, its menacing native inhabitants fit only to be dispossessed. It mat-ters little that the protagonist of Richard Wright's Native Son did not rape and butcher his employer's daughter; that narrative is supplied by the police, by an angry white society, indeed by Western history itself. In the novel, as in life, the threat occurs when a nonwhite leaves the reserve abandoned to him; Wright envisions what happens when the horizon of narrative expectation is firmly set, and his conclusion (born out in seventeenth-century Salem, medieval England, and nineteenth-century America) is that the actual circumstances of history tend to vanish when a narrative of miscegenation can be supplied.

The monster is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker; and so the monster and all that it embodies must be exiled or destroyed. The repressed, however, like Freud himself, always seems to return.

Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire

The monster is continually linked to forbidden practices, in order to normalize and to enforce. The monster also attracts. The same creatures

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who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more ap-pealing as a temporary egress from constraint. This simultaneous repul-sion and attraction at the core of the monster's composition accounts greatly for its continued cultural popularity, for the fact that the monster seldom can be contained in a simple, binary dialectic (thesis, antithe-sis... no synthesis). We distrust and loathe the monster at the same time we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair.

Through the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and per-manently liminal space. Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens to overstep these boundaries, to destroy or decon-struct the thin walls of category and culture. When contained by geo-graphic, generic, or epistemic marginalization, the monster can function as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of (an Other) self. The monster awakens one to the pleasures of the body, to the simple and fleeting joys of being frightened, or frightening—to the experience of mortality and corporality. We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film be-cause we know that the cinema is a temporary place, that the jolting sen-suousness of the celluloid images will be followed by reentry into the world of comfort and light.39 Likewise, the story on the page before us

may horrify (whether it appears in the New York Times news section or Stephen King's latest novel matters little), so long as we are safe in the knowledge of its nearing end (the number of pages in our right hand is dwindling) and our liberation from it. Aurally received narratives work no differently; no matter how unsettling the description of the giant, no matter how many unbaptized children and hapless knights he devours, King Arthur will ultimately destroy him. The audience knows how the genre works.

Times of carnival temporally marginalize the monstrous, but at the same time allow it a safe realm of expression and play: on Halloween everyone is a demon for a night. The same impulse to ataractic fantasy is behind much lavishly bizarre manuscript marginalia, from abstract scribblings at the edges of an ordered page to preposterous animals and vaguely humanoid creatures of strange anatomy that crowd a biblical text. Gargoyles and ornately sculpted grotesques, lurking at the cross-beams or upon the roof of the cathedral, likewise record the liberating fantasies of a bored or repressed hand suddenly freed to populate the

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margins. Maps and travel accounts inherited from antiquity invented whole geographies of the mind and peopled them with exotic and fan-tastic creatures; Ultima Thule, Ethiopia, and the Antipodes were the me-dieval equivalents of outer space and virtual reality, imaginary (wholly verbal) geographies accessible from anywhere, never meant to be discov-ered but always waiting to be explored. Jacques Le Goff has written that the Indian Ocean (a "mental horizon" imagined, in the Middle Ages, to be completely enclosed by land) was a cultural space

where taboos were eliminated or exchanged for others. The weirdness of this world produced an impression of liberation and freedom. The strict morality imposed by the Church was contrasted with the discomfiting at-tractiveness of a world of bizarre tastes, which practiced coprophagy and cannibalism; of bodily innocence, where man, freed of the modesty of clothing, rediscovered nudism and sexual freedom; and where, once rid of restrictive monogamy and family barriers, he could give himself over to polygamy, incest, and eroticism.40

The habitations of the monsters (Africa, Scandinavia, America, Venus, the Delta Quadrant—whatever land is sufficiently distant to be exoticized) are more than dark regions of uncertain danger: they are also realms of happy fantasy, horizons of liberation. Their monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of other genders, other sexual practices, and other social customs can be explored. Hermaphrodites, Amazons, and lascivious cannibals beckon from the edges of the world, the most distant planets of the galaxy.

The co-optation of the monster into a symbol of the desirable is often accomplished through the neutralization of potentially threatening as-pects with a liberal dose of comedy: the thundering giant becomes the bumbling giant.41 Monsters may still function, however, as the vehicles of

causative fantasies even without their valences reversed. What Bakhtin calls "official culture" can transfer all that is viewed as undesirable in it-self into the body of the monster, performing a wish-fulfillment drama of its own; the scapegoated monster is perhaps ritually destroyed in the course of some official narrative, purging the community by eliminating its sins. The monster's eradication functions as an exorcism and, when retold and promulgated, as a catechism. The monastically manufactured Queste del Saint Graal serves as an ecclesiastically sanctioned antidote to the looser morality of the secular romances; when Sir Bors comes across a castle where "ladies of high descent and rank" tempt him to sexual

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indulgence, these ladies are, of course, demons in lascivious disguise. When Bors refuses to sleep with one of these transcorporal devils (de-scribed as "so lovely and so fair that it seemed all earthly beauty was embodied in her"), his steadfast assertion of control banishes them all shrieking back to hell.42 The episode valorizes the celibacy so central to

the authors'belief system (and so difficult to enforce) while inculcating a lesson in morality for the work's intended secular audience, the knights and courtly women fond of romances.

Seldom, however, are monsters as uncomplicated in their use and man-ufacture as the demons that haunt Sir Bors. Allegory may flatten a mon-ster rather thin, as when the vivacious demon of the Anglo-Saxon hagio-graphic poem Juliana becomes the one-sided complainer of Cynewulf's Elene. More often, however, the monster retains a haunting complexity. The dense symbolism that makes a thick description of the monsters in Spenser, Milton, and even Beowulf so challenging reminds us how per-meable the monstrous body can be, how difficult to dissect.

This corporal fluidity, this simultaneity of anxiety and desire, ensures that the monster will always dangerously entice. A certain intrigue is allowed even Vincent of Beauvais's well-endowed cynocephalus, for he occupies a textual space of allure before his necessary dismissal, during which he is granted an undeniable charm. The monstrous lurks some-where in that ambiguous, primal space between fear and attraction, close to the heart of what Kristeva calls "abjection":

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the think-able. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, fascinates desire, which, nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects— But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an else-where as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.43

And the self that one stands so suddenly and so nervously beside is the monster.

The monster is the abjected fragment that e.iables the formation of all kinds of identities—personal, national, cultural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal, particular (even if that "particular" identity is

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an embrace of the power/status/knowledge of abjection itself); as such it reveals their partiality, their contiguity. A product of a multitude of morphogeneses (ranging from somatic to ethnic) that align themselves to imbue meaning to the Us and Them behind every cultural mode of seeing, the monster of abjection resides in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously "exorbitant" and "quite close." Judith Butler calls this conceptual locus "a domain of unlivability and unintelligibility that bounds the domain of intelligible effects," but points out that even when discursively closed off, it offers a base for critique, a margin from which to reread dominant paradigms.44 Like Grendel thundering from

the mere or Dracula creeping from the grave, like Kristeva's "boomer-ang, a vortex of summons" or the uncanny Freudian-Lacanian return of the repressed, the monster is always coming back, always at the verge of irruption.

Perhaps it is time to ask the question that always arises when the mon-ster is discussed seriously (the inevitability of the question a symptom of the deep anxiety about what is and what should be thinkable, an anxiety that the process of monster theory is destined to raise): Do monsters really exist?

Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we?

Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold . ..

of Becoming

"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."

Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge—and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

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Notes

1. Literally, here, Zeitgeist Time Ghost, the bodiless spirit that uncannily incor-porates a "place" that is a series of places, the crossroads that is a point in a movement toward an uncertain elsewhere. Bury the Zeitgeist by the crossroads: it is confused as it awakens, it is not going anywhere, it intersects everyplace; all roads lead back to the monster.

2. I realize that this is an interpretive biographical maneuver Barthes would surely have called "the living death of the author."

3. Thus the superiority of Joan Copjec's "Vampires, Breast-feeding, and Anxiety,"

October 58 (Fall 1991): 25-43,to Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).

4. "The giant is represented through movement, through being in time. Even in the ascription of the still landscape to the giant, it is the activities of the giant, his or her legendary actions, that have resulted in the observable trace. In contrast to the still and perfect universe of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical forces." Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature,

the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1984). 86.

5. Harvey R. Greenberg, "Reimaging the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on

Alien," in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley,

Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1991), 90-91.

6. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11. Garber writes at some length about "category crisis," which she defines as "a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes perme-able, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to an-other: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave.... [That which crosses the border, like the transvestite] will always function as a mechanism of overdetermination—a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another. An analogy here might be the so-called 'tagged' gene that shows up in a genetic chain, indicating the presence of some otherwise hidden con-dition. It is not the gene itself, but its presence, that marks the trouble spot, indicat-ing the likelihood of a crisis somewhere, elsewhere" (pp. 16-17). Note, however, that whereas Garber insists that the transvestite must be read with rather than through, the monster can be read only through—for the monster, pure culture, is nothing of itself.

7. These are the ancient monsters recorded first by the Greek writers Ktesias and Megasthenes, and include such wild imaginings as the Pygmies, the Sciapods (men with one large foot with which they can hop about at tremendous speed or that they can lift over their reclining bodies as a sort of beach umbrella), Blemmyae ("men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders," in Othello's words), and Cynocephali, ferocious dog-headed men who are anthropophagous to boot. John Block Friedman has called these creatures the Plinian races, after the classical encyclopedist who bestowed them to the Middle Ages and early modern period. The Monstrous Races in

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8. The discussion of the implication of the monstrous in the manufacture of heuristics is partially based upon my essay "The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Popular Culture," Medieval Folklore 3 (Fall 1994): 1-37. 9. Jerrold E. Hogle, "The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters," in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Yean, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 161.

10. "The hermeneutic circle does not permit access or escape to an uninterrupted reality; but we do not [have to] keep going around in the same path." Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account," Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 137-38.

11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

12. Barbara Johnson, "Introduction," in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xiii.

13. H. D. S. Greenway, "Adversaries Create Devils of Each Other," Boston Globe, December 15,1992, i.

14. Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 2,

The History of King Richard III, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

University Press, 1963), 7.

15. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988), 30. My discussion of Richard is indebted to Marjorie Garber's provocative work.

16. "A portrait now in the Society of Antiquaries of London, painted about 1505, shows a Richard with straight shoulders. But a second portrait, possibly of earlier date, in the Royal Collection, seems to emblematize the whole controversy [over Richard 's supposed monstrosity], for in it, X-ray examination reveals an original straight shoulder line, which was subsequently painted over to present the raised right shoulder silhouette so often copied by later portraitists." Ibid., 35.

17.1 am hinting here at the possibility of a feminist recuperation of the gendered monster by citing the titles of two famous books about Lilith (a favorite figure in feminist writing): Jacques Bril's Lilith, ou, La Mere obscure (Paris: Payot, 1981), and Siegmund Hurwitz's Lilith, die erste Eva: Eine Studie uber dunkle Aspekte des

Weib-lichen (Zurich: Daimon Verlag, 1980).

18. "The monster-woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies in-transigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author's power to allay 'his' anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and simul-taneously, the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained 'place' and thus generates a story that 'gets away' from its author." Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

1984), 28. The "dangerous" role of feminine will in the engendering of monsters is also explored by Marie-Helene Huet in Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

19. A cynocephalus is a dog-headed man, like the recently decanonized Saint Christopher. Bad enough to be a cynocephalus without being hermaphroditic to